:Because it speeds up the process, that's why. I guess somebody decided that one warning, two notes and a tip would be too rainbow-like. See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=USB_Installation_Media&oldid=218405 this] older edit (which references [http://sprunge.us/SGIY this] script). I reduces the time it needs almost by half. --[[User:DSpider|DSpider]] ([[User talk:DSpider|talk]]) 12:17, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

dd for Windows

Universal USB Installer

This method works fine for me though I got a little stuck when Arch tried to get at the boot device and couldn't find it. Turns out UUSBI's default trick is to label your device "PENDRIVE" if it formats it during the process (user-selectable). I'd like to add a note about this to the section on this page which covers the tool, but as it'd be my first change here I want to be sure I'm not going to be shouted at...

About making the installation media without overwriting

I'm not totally sure if I misunderstood something, but I had to change the path of the entries of the *.cfg files. For instance:

INCLUDE boot/syslinux/archiso_sys.cfg

became:

INCLUDE syslinux/archiso_sys.cfg

It was the only way it worked with the unofficial ISO x86_64 image of march 13th, 2012. Looks like the syslinux command described in the page doesn't get the path as it should.

I edited all of the .cfg files, but probably only editing this ones should have been enough:

archiso.cfg
archiso_head.cfg
archiso_sys_inc.cfg

I hope it could be useful to somebody, because I spend some time with this (I even thought that was a problem with the hardware). I think it could be possible to make a simple script (or give some command lines) to patch the files once they are copied into the USB and run syslinux.

Thanks !!

Recovering the USB drive afterwards

This didn't work for me:

dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx

I tried this multiple times. No matter how I formatted the disk, 'devmon' always mounted '/dev/sdd' as /media/ARCH_whatever.

I finally just zeroed as much of the disk as I thought the ISO might have been written to.

dd count=100 bs=4M if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx; sync

That worked. I believe we need to zero MORE than just the initial 512 bytes, but I have no idea how much. Maybe 2048?

Um, zeroing out the first 512 bytes is fine for MBR-formatted drives. Were you using GPT? Because then you would need to zero out the first 512+512+16k, and the last 16k+512. See GPT. But assuming you used dd, we're talking about MBR-formatted because the ISO contains a MBR (hybrid) partition table.--DSpider (talk) 06:25, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

flush file system buffers after dd

I found that after using dd to write the data to my USB I had to wait for the file system to actually write it to my drive. (as dd completed and returned its stats)
This could cause confusion, should we add 'sync' after the dd command on the artical?

Universal USB Installer

This method seems to not work for me, and from a little research that I did it has to do with SYSLINUX not accepting relative paths for FAT filesystems (see here). Since this would be my first edit, I thought I should run it by the discussion page before adding a note.

Syslinux 4.06 came out a couple of weeks ago, or something like that, and it seems it fixed this bug. The Arch Linux ISO uses the latest syslinux package (for confirmation, you can run pacman -Qi syslinux), but maybe this program adds its own version, like Unetbootin does. In that case, it either needs an update, or you need to use another method.

Rationale for block size

Because it speeds up the process, that's why. I guess somebody decided that one warning, two notes and a tip would be too rainbow-like. See this older edit (which references this script). I reduces the time it needs almost by half. --DSpider (talk) 12:17, 4 February 2013 (UTC)